Currently the Short Message Service (SMS) is the medium of choice for personal messaging. In addition to personal messaging, several companies have designed systems that are intended to include advertisement information in SMS messages. For example, International patent application WO 03/015430 describes a service whereby advertisement data (including length of advertisement (number of characters), a preview of the advertisement and an identifier associated with the advertisement provided by external sources) are stored on mobile terminal in a “local” store, and the user selects an advert, from the store, to accompany an outgoing message. The terminal then calculates a length available for text, and the sender is allowed to enter a message having a length up to the calculated length. An outgoing message is then created, comprising the advertisement ID associated with the selected advertisement and the user's message text, and having a header indicating that the message has advertising content. The outgoing message is then sent from the terminal and received by the SMSC, which checks the header of the message; any message having an identifier corresponding to the advertisement type is passed to an “ad server”. The ad server processes the message, effectively selecting an advertisement from a store, creating one or more messages that comprise the selected advertisement and creating an SMS message that can be read by the recipient's mobile phone terminal.
Despite the popularity of SMS messaging, wireless has not yet made its mark as an advertising medium. This is partly because each SMS message is limited to 160 characters, and these characters can only be selected from the ASCII set, which makes it difficult to include meaningful and catchy product information in the messages. As a result the ad server quite often creates a plurality of messages, which means that either the receiving terminal has to be equipped with some software that concatenates the messages together in some elegant manner (since presentation is very important with advertising), or the receiving terminal simply displays the messages separately, as is the case with non-modified SMS messages exceeding 160 characters in length. Since the success of the advertising industry is heavily reliant on the impression created by advertisements, and since SMS messages can only provide an extremely restricted visual impact, this means that, as an advertising medium, the SMS communication service is rather limited.
International patent application PCT/AU00/01296, published as WO0131497 describes delivering advertisement data wirelessly as video data. In one arrangement video data streams are unicast or multicast to individual subscribers, the subscribers having a corresponding player or decoder on their terminal for decoding and displaying the received streams. These video streams are described as e.g. live news, video-on-demand (VOD) provider etc., and the video advertising can include multiple video objects, which can be sourced separately. In one arrangement, a video advertisement object can be dynamically inserted into a video stream being delivered to the decoder, the nature of this insertion being controlled by control data embedded in the advert object. Alternatively an interactive video file can be downloaded, rather than streamed, to a device so that it can be viewed offline or online at any time. A downloaded video file has all of the interaction and dynamic media composition capabilities that are provided by the online streaming process and includes menus, advertising objects, and forms that register user selections and feedback. Whilst this is creates a significantly improved impression, from the point of view of perception of a product or service, video files (object or streamed data) require a significant amount of bandwidth and often taken an unacceptable amount of time to download to a mobile device.
An object of the present invention is to provide a convenient method of presenting information to a user of a mobile terminal.